Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Cancer statistics, 2009
I’ve just received the latest cancer statistics from CA–A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The good news is that overall cancer death rates are down from their peak in the 1990s and rates of specific cancers are stable or decreasing. None seems to be increasing.
Look at what is happening with heart disease (page 15). Its rates have fallen by half since the mid-1970s for people under age 85. Even for people over 85, heart disease death rates are falling rapidly.
Obesity is a risk factor for both cancer and heart disease. So ideas about its effects on health need to take these statistics into consideration. But before dismissing obesity as a risk factor, note that both heart disease and cancer remain leading causes of death, and both disproportionately affect low-income groups. Groups with low income and education tend to have many risk factors for these diseases, among them high rates of obesity.
Public health still has plenty of work to do.
